Brian Burns: Coast Guard On Track to Meet DoD Deadline for Windows 10 Migration

Brian Burns, acting chief information officer of the U.S. Coast Guard, has said the service branch is on track to meet the Defense Department’s March 2018 deadline to transition to Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system, Federal News Radio reported Friday.

Rear Adm. Kevin Lunday, commander of the Coast Guard’s Cyber Command, said the Windows 10 migration provides the service a common secure baseline to defend its information technology networks against hostile threats.

Lunday noted that the military branch will transition to the implementation of the virtual desktop interface after it completes the Windows 10 migration phase.

“That will allow us to provide more robust security in terms of having virtualization and also the capability of having remote access,” Lunday said of VDI.

Burns told the station’s Ask the CIO about the Coast Guard’s intent to migrate to the cloud and the need to meet the requirements of DoD and the Department of Homeland Security to facilitate cloud adoption.

He said those requirements include the use of DoD’s information network, migration to the Pentagon’s Joint Information Environment and compliance with DHS’ data center consolidation initiative.

Burns said the service has begun to consolidate its data centers for its aviation and surface force logistics centers and has partnered with DHS to “provide a department-level financial management services capability.”

“That leads us into the next steps of going to the cloud,” he added.